I’ve recently redone our blog template at Technomadics, and while setting up the new preview template in MarsEdit, thought I’d take a stab at implementing support for captions, too, via some javascript in the template.

…And wrapped a div around the main “#body#, #extended#” content with an id of content:

<div id="content">
#body#
#extended#
</div>

Basically, it polls the content area for changes, and when triggered, runs it though a filter. The above is extensible, and by adding additional “apply_shortcode” calls from “apply_filters“, more shortcodes can be simulated.

Every now and then I find myself needing to automate some web requests, either to download using something a little more robust than a web browser, scrape some web content, or to maintain a session. That automation can be a bit of a pain if there’s a form submission involved, because it means opening up the page source, finding the form and any connected javascript code, and figuring out what fields are submitted.

A little utility I just put together does that for you: Post Grabber detects POST data and generates an equivalent “curl” command that can be used in shell or Automator scripts.

Post Grabber works with its own internal browser, so it can intercept POST submissions directly. That means it works with HTTPS, unlike the traditional web sniffer approach.

The Clipper is a bookmarklet that works in any modern web browser, and lets you clip information from any website — hotel directories, restaurant websites, even forum postings — to Google My Maps. Addresses are auto-discovered via some super-sleuthing magic, images pulled out and any selected text is placed into the description.

You can save to an existing map, or create a new one on the spot.

It’s great for doing travel or errand research — find a good hostel (or just the closest Apple store!), just click the “Clipper” button, then “Save”, and it’ll appear on your maps in The Cartographer, all automatically.

It’s free for use, and all it needs is any modern web browser, and a Google account.

TwitThis – Use Multiple Twitter Clients on your iPhone Application The class TwitterClientManager loads a list list of supported Twitter clients is loaded from a plist file, which can be extended to support more clients in the future;
Each Twitter client is represented by an instance of the TwitterClient class;
The user can choose his preferred Twitter client at any time, and launch the application by a simple touch; the TwitterClientManager class stores the selected value in the user settings.

I recently became disgruntled with the way my blogs displayed search results. By default, WordPress blogs will show searched posts exactly as they might appear on an index or archives page: Typically as an extract, or perhaps even as the full entry.

This doesn’t help at all if you’re looking for something in particular – It’s a much better idea to show the post within the context of the search query, as real search engines do.

Twitter doesn’t yet come with its own inline image support, so we tend to be limited to using image hosting services, and linking to them with short URLs. So, services like Tweetpic host the image, and we direct traffic to them in return.

Thinking it’s better to keep things in the family, and take better advantage of that traffic, I put together an image hosting setup of my own. Now viewers come to my own site, instead of someone else’s!

WordPress Theme Development Frameworks If you build and develop WordPress themes often, you will probably be fed up of all the repetitive code writing, the constantly checking of your mark-up and all you really want to do is focus on the design and the project-specific features. The answer is a WordPress development framework

PHP: Display Adobe PSD files on a web page "Any webdesigner know the PSD filetype, which is the Adobe Photoshop format. PSDs have a lot of great features, as such as layers, but they can’t being read by a browser. Unless you use this great PHP class!"

About This

I am Michael Tyson, and I run A Tasty Pixel from our home in the hills of Melbourne, Australia. I write on a
variety of technology and software development topics. I've also recently returned from a 3.5-year journey around
Europe in a motorhome.